Gospels

“What do you think is the most important word in the Bible?” That’s the question author Sara Miles posed to the audience who gathered at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lutheran Center last month.

My pastor Beth Ann was there that night, and when we met for lunch a couple of days later, she asked me the same question.

I couldn’t decide on my answer; there were too many good options. Was it love? Grace? Forgiveness? Salvation? Or maybe it Jesus or God – those both seemed like good possibilities, too.

I looked at Beth Ann and shrugged, unable to choose just one word.

“She said it was with,” Beth Ann answered. “She said the most important word in the Bible is with.”

I hadn’t expected that answer, but when I heard it, I nodded. Out of context, with isn’t a very important or impactful word. A mere preposition, with doesn’t carry much weight. But in the context of the Bible, and in the context of this day, Christmas Eve, with is everything.

Immanuel.

It means God with us. Not simply God alone – unreachable, distant, removed – but God with us – right here, right now, in the midst of our everyday, ordinary, messy lives.

In the Gospel of Luke we read a story that for many is as familiar as our own personal history. Some of us have read the story of Jesus’ birth every Christmas for as long as we can remember. Some of us can recite it nearly by heart. And yet, when was the last time we really thought about the impact of Jesus’ birth on our own personal lives and on who we are as human beings living in this present moment?

Jesus came humbly, with humility, not as a powerful, ruling Lord, but as a helpless, dependent, human baby, wrapped in swaddling and laid in a manger. He came like the rest of us, as a human being. He was divine, but he was also human, and he experienced life, with its laughter and lament, its triumph and travail, like we do.

Jesus knows our pain, and our passion; he knows the depth of our sorrow and the height of our joy. He knows it because he lived it. He knows it because he lives it with us still.

With. It’s a small word, a preposition, pretty ordinary and unremarkable. But when it comes to our Savior, with makes all the difference. Immanuel is God with us, born into flesh 2,000 years ago, present with us today.

…

From my family to yours, we wish you a joyful Christmas and a peaceful, healthy New Year. Thank you for being the very best people!

Back in 1983, when I was thirteen years old, the one thing I wanted for Christmas more than anything else in the world was a Cabbage Patch Kid. In particular, I wanted a Cabbage Patch Baby, a girl with a smooth bald head and a round, dimpled face.

Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage that year, even among thirteen-year-olds. By the end of 1983, more than 3 million had been sold (the correct terminology at the time was “adopted”). I remember the lines snaking outside the doors of Toys R Us, the shelves stripped empty minutes after the store opened.

Needless to say, I didn’t get my Cabbage Patch Baby for Christmas that year. No matter where my mom looked, they were always sold out. And this was long before the Internet and the opportunity to bid ten times the original price for one on eBay (not that my parents would have done that…though I certainly would have expected them to).

I was crushed. That Christmas I received plenty of gifts – toys and clothes and stuffed animals and games – but none of it mattered to me. I didn’t really appreciate any of the gifts I received because none was the be-all-and-end-all gift I so desperately desired. I was ungrateful, simply because I had not received the gift.

I realize comparing Jesus to a Cabbage Patch Kid is a bit of a stretch, if not outright sacrilegious, but bear with me for a moment here.

Mary received the ultimate be-all-and-end-all gift when she was blessed with the Son of God. Clearly she was grateful for the blessing of Jesus Christ – her Magnificat, a song of praise and thanksgiving, is a testament to the depth of her gratitude for the ultimate of gifts.

But look closely at the words Mary speaks to Elizabeth, because there is something telling here:

“For the Mighty One is holy, and he has done great things for me.” (Luke 1:49)

“He has done great things for me.”

Things. Plural. Mary acknowledges that God had already done great things for her, even before blessing her with the greatest gift.

The Magnificat is a song of thanksgiving for all the gifts God has bestowed upon Mary, not just this one particular blessing, magnificent and spectacular though it was. It’s clear from this statement that she cultivated a continuous spirit of gratitude, even before she was blessed with the ultimate gift as the mother of our Savior Jesus Christ. Mary recognized that God had been good to her all along.

Truth be told, I’m not all that different today from the girl who was crushed by the Cabbage Patch Kid Christmas of 1983. Too often, I’m so caught up in the gift I desire right now, the blessing I think I deserve today, that I neglect the big picture; I fail to appreciate or even remember the myriad blessings God has bestowed on me all along. So focused am I on the one thing, I forget all the great things God has done for me.

I would do well to take a cue from Mary, who praised God all along for all the gifts, big and small, that had been bestowed upon her.

When I first returned to God and faith after a long time-out, I expected everything about me to be radically transformed as a result of my conversion. Once I claimed my faith, I assumed I would become A Topnotch Christian.

I was quickly disabused of that notion.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that although I’d proclaimed my faith in God, I was still the same flawed, fallible person I’d always been: prone to judge, glass half-empty, quick-tempered, impatient (I could go on).

For a while my solution to this dilemma was simply to work harder. I strove to pray more often; to worship more authentically; to love even the most irritating people; to be positive and grateful; to follow all the rules.

You can probably guess how that worked out.

“Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16, my italics) the rich man asked Jesus. I believe the rich man’s intentions were mostly good when he asked Jesus this question. I believe he truly wanted to prove his faith and thought he needed to do something to make that happen.

Of course this wasn’t what the rich man wanted to hear, and so he slunk away, unwilling to release his tight-fisted grip on his worldly possessions.

On one level, this story is clearly about the fact that the rich man valued his money over a true relationship with God. Yet I also think Jesus has a deeper message for us in this story, specifically in these six words: “If you want to be perfect…” (19:21)

Jesus knew he was asking the impossible of the rich man, not only because the man was unwilling to part with his possessions, but also because achieving perfection via our own merit is simply impossible.

The truth is, no matter how diligently we follow the rules, no matter how ambitiously we strive to live like Jesus, we will always fail. No matter how hard we work to earn our eternal salvation, we will always fall short.

Perfection is impossible.

It sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? That was certainly the disciples’ reaction when they heard the conversation between Jesus and the rich man. “Who in the world can be saved then?” (19:25) they asked Jesus.

Jesus’ answer to his dismayed disciples is the deeper lesson in this story: “Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.” (19:26, italics mine)

The answer, in a word, to the question of how in the world we can be saved, is grace.

This story about Jesus and the rich man is, at its core, a lesson about grace.

Humanly speaking, it’s impossible for us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven on our own merit. But with God, the possibilities are endless. God’s grace makes us pure and unblemished in his eyes.

Grace is the exception to the rule. Grace is the exception to the impossible.

Often when I tell my faith story or give my testimony, I use phrases like, “When I returned to God…” or “When I came back to God…” or even, “When God found me.” That’s the way I’ve understood my story: I was estranged from God for twenty years, and then I slowly came back to him. Recently, though, I’ve begun to realize that while my understanding of that process isn’t wrong, necessarily, it’s also not the whole story.

The whole story is encapsulated in this one simple verse from John:

“You didn’t choose me. I chose you.” (John 15:16)

Sometimes I forget that God does the choosing; I forget that he chose me as his beloved child even before I took my first wailing breath on this earth.

I forget that the door into his love and grace was open from the get-go, a standing, open invitation to me – to all of us.

Remember the story of the prodigal son? We typically pay a lot of attention to the son who returns in that story. We relate to the son’s need to seek forgiveness; we see ourselves in his act of returning to his father and his home.

But think about the father in that story for a moment. Sure, he comes out to greet his son and to welcome him back after his long hiatus. But the truth is, the door to the father’s house was always open; all those years, the invitation still stood. The father greeted his lost son with open arms, but that son had long been chosen as beloved by him; that fact never changed.

I tend to give myself a fair amount of credit for turning back to God after a twenty-year hiatus. If I’m not careful, I can easily slip into the misguided belief that I chose God. But as I mentioned earlier, that view is a subtle misrepresentation of the story.

The fact is, God does the choosing; each one of us is already chosen, right from the start. That invitation into grace, into the God-with-us life, is waiting for us on the day we are born. Our role is to say “yes.”

It wasn’t that the two travelers simply didn’t recognize the risen Jesus come alongside them, but that God “kept them,” or prevented them from recognizing him. It was intentional.

At first glance, that intentional obscuring of the truth seems unnecessarily cruel. After all, the followers of Jesus had certainly been through enough grief and devastation at that point. They’d witnessed the arrest, torture and murder of their beloved leader. All their expectations, everything they’d believed in and hoped for, lay smashed at the bottom of the cross. They were lost, bewildered and reeling from the shock.

Yet God kept the travelers from recognizing the risen Messiah in the moment of their deepest and most profound despair.

This, it seems to me, is the quintessential tough-love moment.

I don’t know about you, but God’s tough-love teaching is not my preferred method. I think it’s fair to say we’d all much prefer that God reveal himself to us straight up, exactly when and exactly how we need him.

But God doesn’t always work that way.

True, it would have been easier and gentler for Jesus to reveal his identity immediately in that moment on the dusty road to Emmaus. But consider this:

Might Jesus’ immediate revelation have inhibited the opportunity for greater, deeper spiritual growth in the men? Might an immediate revelation have inhibited some of the hard internal heart work that needed to take place?

Sometimes I think God intentionally blinds us to his presence, not so he can see into our hearts (after all, as an omniscient God, he already knows our innermost thoughts), but so that we might glimpse the state of our own hearts.

After all, if God is obviously present, would we do the hard work of looking into the depths of our own hearts to uncover our weakness, our lack of trust, our unbelief?

Jesus understood that Cleopas and his friend simply could not get past the obvious facts of Jesus’ crucifixion. In the telling and retelling of that story, they could not move past their shock and unbelief. They forgot what Jesus had told them again and again: that his death was not the end, that all hope was not lost.

In obscuring his identity as the risen Messiah, Jesus forced the Emmaus travelers to look hard inside their own hearts in order to face their lack of trust and faith.

Like I said, it’s tough love. Jesus doesn’t always give us the easy answer. His goal isn’t always to make us comfortable or offer us the easy way out.

Sometimes Jesus prods us to do the hard work of looking inward, digging into the detritus of our hearts and resowing our spiritual soil, so that ultimately we are able to enjoy a deeper, more authentic relationship with him.

Primary Sidebar

Living out faith in the everyday is no joke. If you’re anything like me, some days you feel full of confidence and hope, eager to proclaim God’s goodness and love to the world. Other days…not so much.

Let me say straight up: I wrestle with my faith. Most days I feel a little bit like Jacob, wrangling his blessing out of God. And most days I’m okay with that. I believe God made me a questioner and a wrestler for a reason, and I believe one of those reasons is so that I can connect more authentically with others.